


Human

by starlight_brigade



Category: Ninja Sex Party - Fandom
Genre: (so much stabbing), Blood and Violence, Gen, In-Universe RPF, M/M, Stabbing, Stalking, possible canon divergence
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-30
Updated: 2018-07-30
Packaged: 2019-06-18 18:09:12
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 3
Words: 11,048
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15491679
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/starlight_brigade/pseuds/starlight_brigade
Summary: Ninja Daniel tries to leave his life as a ruthless killing machine behind him, but the Clan won't let him go quietly. Ninja Brian is sent to assassinate him for his betrayal... but, for reasons he can't explain, can't bring himself to do it.(A gritty in-universe NSP origin story)





	1. Heart

**Author's Note:**

> I did this for the Game Grumps Big Bang 2018! Accompanying art was done by [burnthusks](https://burnthusks.tumblr.com/post/176419276262/ninja-brian-opened-his-eyes-fully-to-look-at)!

_Blood._

_So much blood._

_“More.”_

_The demand echoed, coming from nowhere, not even really audible, the thought projecting itself directly into his mind._

__

__

_The warm liquid covered every inch of him from head to toe, staining his vision with dark crimson._

_“More.”_

_He was wading in it now, drenched and sticky, tasting the salt as it flowed and cascaded over his skin._

_“More.”_

_Swimming. Try as one might, one can’t tread a substance that’s thicker than water. It filled his lungs as he gasped for what little air he could force through._

_Drowning._

_“More.” ___

____

____

_Not enough._

_Never enough._

Danny had lost count of the times he had woken up screaming. 

His eyes flew open wide in an attempt to let more light in than was available. They tried to adjust to little avail; the ceiling was just as dark as it had been when he had gone to bed. 

He panted heavily, making up for the breaths he couldn’t take just moments ago. The air felt thicker than it should have been. 

He forcefully shoved the sheets aside and sat up, right hand knocking over a bottle of lotion and a box of tissues as it clumsily sought the bedside lamp. 

In an instant, he was greeted by pleasant shades of blue and white as they were illuminated by pale yellow light, and he had never been happier in the moment to be in his tiny, dingy house in New Jersey. Clean. Dry. Safe. 

Relatively so, anyway. 

The only thing he could really do was to comfort himself in the hope that, even if he couldn’t ever have a meaningful relationship, even if he couldn’t live a normal life, at least one day the nightmares would stop. 

As for right now though, he was suffocating.

His breathing, although now consistent, was unsatisfactory, inhaling the stuffy recycled carbon dioxide which he had spent the last few hours expelling. His heart still pounded hard in his chest as if it was trying to escape. He rubbed his tired eyes, but all he saw was red. He couldn’t go back. Not now. 

_I need to get out._

He pushed himself out of bed, threw on a pair of jeans and a jacket, just enough to not freeze his ass off in the cold autumn air, and was out the door. 

He shoved his hands deep in his pockets and took deep, calculated breaths of the chilled night as he walked, welcoming the change of temperature and humidity as part of the change of environment. There was something strangely serene about the buzzing orange streetlights and flickering neon signs in the shitty part of town he called his home. Although the fear never really went away when you were on the run from a dangerous organization of vicious murderers, but that was to be expected. He always felt eyes on him, down every street, around every corner. And he knew it probably wasn’t just paranoia; knowing the Clan, he was being hunted. He knew that. And at this point, he wasn’t going to fight it. He was just waiting for them to come out and kill him and get it over with.

Maybe then he wouldn’t have the nightmares anymore. 

Nightmares in which he was drowning, unable to provide that which was asked of him. Nightmares in which he saw the terrified screaming faces of his ultimately innocent victims, begging him to leave them to live the life that he had taken away. He didn’t. He hadn’t believed he’d had a choice in the matter. 

Time and time again, he had been assured that he would get used to it — the feeling of bones cracking underneath layers of skin and muscle; the warm, salty smell of blood and viscera; seeing the light drain from a person’s eyes as the life faded away even while the look of terror remained, forever etched into their face as a fearful epitaph. 

In a way, he did get used to these things, in the sense of their inevitability. But something else always came after. No matter how many times and however many methods they used to attempt to drive it out of him, it was something that stuck with him, and rattled him to his core, inexplicably rousing searing internal hurt despite the deep-set existential nothingness that left him otherwise hollow — a black hole within him; both heavy as the weight of a thousand planets, and empty as the dark expansive nothingness of space that surrounded them. 

Civilians called it “guilt”. An innate primal tool given by nature to try to preserve the lives of the members of your fellow species, keep the numbers up, don’t go extinct. When a human life takes another human life, guilt ensues. 

But what happens when they take over? When the population of the apex predator with complex emotions grows too large and too powerful to be stopped? They become a parasite, feeding off the planet’s unsustainable resources to provide for their own greed. 

It would make sense, then, wouldn’t it? For the apex predator’s only threat to be the one thing that is capable of keeping it in check: itself. 

Or so they were told. So was the reason they were chosen by the Clan, stolen from a life they could have had; told they were the offspring of leeches that stole without giving back; told they had a higher calling, that they could be better, that while the damage was done, preventative measures could be taken and therefore must. For the sake of the future, for the sake of the earth, for the sake of biology as a whole. 

The Clan made no mistakes. The children they chose were hand-picked from the most impressionable, the ones with the least amount of learned empathy, easily manipulated away from guilt. Raised, not just to be silent and deadly killers, but to shun the social construct of emotion. And those who couldn’t let go were easily eliminated at the hands of those who could. 

Danny had tried his best, he really did. A “people-pleaser”, some would call him. The Clan had been late in assimilating him, such that he unfortunately had one sole recollection of the feeling of acknowledgement, of having known that he made someone happy — the boy had quite the memory, damn him. And the thing about humans, is that no matter how thoroughly they’ve been stripped of their emotional complexity, no matter how deeply to the predatory functions of their animalistic essence they’ve been bored… when they find a tiny shred of a hint of the fact that they once had a soul, it returns to them, and they’re lost, back to the humanity from which great strides had been made in separating them. 

Danny remembered happiness. He remembered love. And his relentless, undying, curious spirit threatened to break his loyalty. 

It was a shame. He was so good at what he did, having truly earned his deserved title of Ninja, given a word as an identifier to adorn the black on his chest, bookended by a dragon on either side: tsui — the end. The end of life, death coming swiftly and easily from the shadows, completely undetected, leaving nothing in his wake but lifeless corpse after lifeless corpse. But in the wake of that, he felt the white-hot blade of remorse cut through him from the inside, a mirror to the pain he had caused in others. 

He powered through it all, determined to make his superiors proud. For his whole life, that’s all he wanted. But even after brutal training, murder after ruthless murder, he was never told he was enough, always believing he could be better. 

In his ventures out into the civilian world, he caught too many glimpses to stay content. Snapshots of happiness, pride, love, and lust were all too enticing. He yearned for those experiences, wondering why all he did was hurt people, only to hurt himself. He found himself staying out longer on extermination missions, wandering, watching, observing. Wanting. Craving. 

His last mission was an old woman: a frail, 98-year-old childless widow who was useless to society and a waste of resources. As he slid open the unlocked bedroom window of the small house that was as ancient as she was (or at least appeared to be) and he silently lifted himself into the darkness, the bedside lamp flicked on. She was propped up on a mountain of pillows, her lower half hidden under several blankets, topped by a flowery blue quilt which was seemingly handmade. Her hand slowly and shakily moved from underneath the yellow tasseled lampshade to her side. 

She was looking directly at him.

But she wasn’t afraid, in spite of the fact that her cataract-clouded eyes most likely only saw a dark mass of shadow, as only his eyes were made visible underneath the black fabric of his uniform. 

“I’ve been expecting you.” Her voice trembled; she was weak, yet unafraid. Danny was motionless, paralyzed by uncertainty. “What took you so long?” 

Her final words echoed in his mind as he just stood there, watching her fade out, the life draining from her eyes. Without his help. 

He did nothing. He watched her die, not causing it, and not stopping it. He didn’t have to. 

He never had to. Not in the first place, and never again. 

He found he liked life. He liked seeing it blossom and thrive rather than be cut short and killed off. The distant chatter of people within the bustling noise of the city was as good as peaceful silence, lulling him to sleep on fitful nights when he questioned himself, wondering if he truly deserved what he wanted. 

He made an active effort to avoid thinking about it. Whether or not he deserved those things, they were available to him, and he now had the freedom to have them. 

Obtaining them, however… That was a little more difficult. He found serenity in the company of others, relishing in the connection of one soul with another, but he figured he had missed some kind of important lesson somewhere down the line, because now he was maladjusted and unsocialized, and cursing every deity listening for it. 

The several times he was successful were when the girl was in a particularly good mood and found his advancements “funny” or “charming”. It was kind of annoying, but he took what he could get. And then afterward, she didn’t want to stay, and he couldn’t make it last. 

He supposed it was for the best. He wouldn’t want to live a life with himself either. 

Unfortunately for him, though, he was the only one who really had to.

So he lived his life day-by-day, expecting not to have many of them. He took what little money he could find and lived the way he wanted. Although not everything he had dreamed about for so long, it was something. And to a certain extent, that was enough.

He had been walking for a long time before he paused in his wandering thoughts enough to realize he was farther from his house than he probably should have been for the short walk he had intended it to be. He slowed to reorient himself before rounding a corner, passing a shortcut through an alleyway, deciding he wasn’t in the usual mood to get murdered tonight. 

A phone rang. It was very close.

The shrill sound jarred Danny out of his thoughts and he stopped, finding its origin to be an old, graffiti-covered payphone in the alley he had just passed. He knew exactly what it was about, because those things weren’t supposed to ring anymore.

He had long since stopped answering phones. He got rid of his own, every trace of one he had, finding that simply unplugging it wasn’t enough to get it to stop ringing, and still, at any hour of the day, ancient payphones that had been out of commission for at least twenty years would ring as he neared them, passed them, and ignored them. They were incredibly persistent in trying to communicate with him, despite the obvious active avoidance.

According to the spoken code, the weather would change on Mount Fuji depending on the urgency of the situation for which you were being summoned. Occasions that called for the assignment of a specific target were foretold by snow, promotions by sun, scolding by rain.

In Danny’s case, as the deep, altered voice had growled through the receiver numerous times, it had been raining on Mount Fuji for a long time.

For the past couple of weeks, though, the ringing of the phones became less and less frequent, apparently taking the hint that he wasn’t going to answer. Instead, the eyes he felt on him constantly grew more malicious, following him wherever he went. From the grocery store to the CVS, to his own house, to the homes of his conquests, whether he was successful as he went inside, or not so as he was defeatedly shut out. But tonight, they were trying once more. 

The phone in the alley rang again. It was defiance mixed with morbid curiosity as to what they could possibly want to tell him after such a long period of silence that drove him toward it. His hand hesitantly connected with the plastic made filthy from years of neglect, and he raised it to his ear. 

“There is a hurricane on Mount Fuji.”

Danny slammed the phone back on its cradle. That was a new one. He could only guess what it meant, but he had a pretty good idea, and as he turned what had previously been a slow, ponderous wander into an aimed, determined walk, he decided he didn’t want to find out for sure.

He walked for what felt like an eternity in the general direction of his house, passing the bright casinos and hotels, and the dark dive bars and diners, shops that were closed for the night, homeless people silently huddled inside sleeping bags, a duo of men falling over each other while professing their love for the other. 

Payphones rang. 

He ignored every single one. 

Back at home, he slammed the front door behind him and closed his eyes, running a hand through the tangled curly mess of his hair and reveling in the silence unsullied by the shrieking ringing which, even as he stood there, the back of his head resting against the door in the dark, continued to echo in his mind. 

He flipped on the living room light and it reluctantly flickered to life, casting a yellow glow on the tacky old-lady furniture. He hadn’t bothered to replace it; it would have been more effort than it was worth if he was just going to get killed anyway. Besides, if he was being honest with himself, he kind of liked the colorful faded pastels of the floral upholstery, the white lace doilies that decorated the distressed antique wood furniture, and the peeling yellow wallpaper that had most likely been there since the seventies. They were charming, and somehow made him feel at home. Or maybe what he felt was a longing for the home of this kind he never had. Either way, although he never touched any of it, he had no desire to get rid of it. 

The payphones still rang. Whether they were fabrications in his mind or actual phones somewhere outside in the distance, he heard them. 

One of his favorite things that the old woman left behind was her record player, still in completely functional working condition even after decades of use. The sound quality wasn’t great, but the stereo got pretty loud, at least loud enough to drown out his overabundant anxieties. So he used it a lot. 

Since discovering it, he missed no opportunity to flip through boxes and shelves full of colorfully decorated cardboard sleeves, finding the most interesting art and adopting it. Building from the previous owner’s collection of whimsical folk music from the sixties, his library had grown quite extensive, and records were stacked high on almost every surface. His favorites were close at hand, near the turntable for their inevitable cycle back under the needle. He found peace in music — all of it. From synthwave to 80s pop to heavy metal, he felt the vibrations of the sound waves deep within him, stoking any ember of motivation to live that was left and turning it into a roaring fire. 

Right now he needed something. Anything. Loud.

At the top of the stack to the left of the player, intense yellow eyes glared out from behind the painted white feathers of an owl. Rush. Perfect.

He dropped the needle and turned the stereo up as far as it could go. Although it was grainy, the bass rattled the old wooden picture frames on the brittle walls of the old house, and his insides shook with the vibrations, drowning out every sound he had perceived in the silence.

He retreated once again to the bedroom and, without turning on the light, collapsed onto the bed. The volume only lowered slightly with distance, but not much, as the ancient walls were thin, and he was grateful for that. His eyes were heavy with deep exhaustion as he stared blankly at the darkened ceiling, so he gave into the weight and closed his eyes. 

He allowed himself to drift away on the energetic strains. He allowed his heart to follow the rhythm. 

He allowed himself to lose track of time.

And consciousness.

—

He startled awake, barely having time to register what little of the image before him could be seen in the darkness before the heavy weight of a body collapsed over him. He felt a familiar warm wetness seep through the denim of his carelessly un-shed jeans as he nearly knocked over the bedside lamp in his hasty quest to turn it on, only to see a vision of something he knew all too well. Something that he had hoped he would be able to leave in the past and never see again. The dull pain that accompanied the knots of empathy hit his stomach as the near-impossible amount of dark red blossomed across the blue of the quilt and turned it purple, a sight he never wanted to see from the night he first laid eyes on it. The house was still and silent, aside from the quiet repetition of the record scratching as the needle circled the inside of the well-worn vinyl disc.

He looked up at the perpetrator, an unfamiliar set of large blue eyes, made larger at how widely they were opened as they stared out at him through the shroud of his black mask. The figure stood tensely still, blood-covered knife still in-hand. Danny held steady eye contact, preparing for the death that was sure to come in the next instant. 

But as he sat expectantly, the figure just… stood there. Unmoving. Unwavering. Unblinking. Where the hell did this guy come from?

The embroidery on his chest that displayed his given word ( _Ki_ , “slash”) — which was similar, he noticed, to that emblazoned on the chest of the newly-lifeless corpse that lay on top of him ( _Ha_ , “blade”) — was recognizable anywhere, but that just posed more questions. There was absolutely no way the Clan wasn’t out to kill him, so why would they have sent a protector?

… From themselves?

And why did he feel like he knew that given word?

“You just _had_ to go for the carotid, didn’t you?” Danny posed the question rhetorically, not knowing what to say otherwise to accurately state his confusion.

The stranger that stood before him only twitched his eyebrows down into a furrow in response. Obviously dissatisfied with his reaction. 

Danny shoved the weight off his legs to free them, which he then swung over the edge of the bed, feet landing firmly on the floor. He glanced once more at the body. The only feature visible through its mask was a set of dark eyes, the emptiness of death casting them in a haze that was disturbingly neutral. 

He tossed the loose edge of the quilt over the corpse and let out a deep sigh as he leaned back on one hand and rubbed his eyes with the other, partially out of exasperation and partially because he was still attempting to process the events that had just unfolded above him while he was blissfully asleep not two minutes ago.

He looked back up at the figure, who was still there, still motionless, and still staring at him. 

“You want some tea?” Might as well get some kind of caffeine. He wasn’t going to be able to go back to sleep tonight. 

The Ninja just furrowed his brow more in frustration, incredulously tilting his head to an infinitesimal degree. 

Danny took that as a yes. “Cool.” He nodded as he stood and started toward the bedroom door. Once there, with one hand resting on the doorknob, he turned and pointed a threatening finger at the figure that still stood watching him. “You’re buying me new sheets.” He left the door wide open as he padded into the kitchen. 

Under the sound of the water from the sink filling the iron kettle, he almost didn’t notice the lack of sound following the needle being lifted off the record, but he let it go. 

He was surprised, though, as he placed the kettle on the stove, to hear the scratching of the needle being placed back on a vinyl. And then even more so, as the blue gas flame of the stove clicked to life, when he heard the recognizable piano riff of _Tiny Dancer_ come out of the speakers.

The juxtaposition of the Ninja shrouded in black sorting through the haphazard stacks of records next to the turntable as it was producing such melodic notes was almost startling. He crossed his arms and leaned amusedly against the doorless arch that served as a passageway from the kitchen to the dining table. “Elton John fan, huh?” he asked, not expecting a response at this point. 

The Ninja spun around to face him. Abnormally bare hand holding his place in the middle of an accessibly short tower, the large blue eyes narrowed defensively. He said nothing. 

Danny raised his hands in a peaceful gesture. “It’s okay, man, I am too.” He laughed shortly to himself. “Why do you think I have so many of his records?”

The Ninja shrugged and nodded in concession, then raised an accusatory eyebrow and looked back to where he had left off in the stack. 

Danny sighed. “Yeah, you’re right, it is a little… eclectic.” He heard the water boiling on the stove behind him and kept talking as he returned to the kitchen. “I kinda just started collecting them and now it’s more of a random assortment of shit I’ve found and less of a library of stuff I listen to on the regular, you know?” Right as the kettle began to whistle, he turned off the stove and prepared tea for himself on autopilot, continuing his rambling. “I do have favorites though, like, stuff that I fall back on.”

Steaming mug in hand, he wandered back into the living room toward the stranger that was now rooting through his record collection. Which he was unusually totally cool with. For some reason he couldn’t explain, he trusted this strange bloodthirsty murderer enough not to do any damage to them. ”Rush is probably my favorite.”

The Ninja pointedly glanced at the yellow eyes that peered out from behind other records. 

“Mmhm—“ he confirmed around a mouthful of tea, “ _Farewell to Kings_ has more of an overall melody and tone that I like more though. I chose _Fly by Night_ because…” He trailed off, stopping himself before he ended up saying way too much to this complete stranger. “... I don’t know, it’s loud. And I kinda needed loud.” Why was he so okay with this? 

There was a long pause as Danny silently watched the waves of steam in his mug of dark liquid flow upwards and evaporate into the air. He was aware of movement in his periphery as his guest resumed browsing. 

“Who are you, anyway?”

The Ninja hesitated for a moment short enough to almost go by unnoticed, before he continued his mindless action, pretending, unconvincingly, not to have heard the question. 

Danny looked at the embroidered gold character displayed on the center of his chest for the answer. _Ki_. “Slash”. He knew he had seen it somewhere. Heard the word. Known to watch for it, to beware of it, to fear it. To model oneself after its behavior. 

Could it be?

“Ninja _Brian_?” The black mask crinkled in a wince, flinching at the words. A telltale sign that he had been correctly identified. 

“Holy shit…” The questions were abundant, Danny’s mind coming up with them simultaneously, causing his thoughts to trip over themselves as they raced, until the only word that made it through the confusion, the one that every one of his questions had in common, stumbled out: “Why?”

Ninja Brian stopped, inhaling deeply before looking back at Danny, eyes alight with a raging flame of aggressive emotion he had never seen before. It was jarring to see this chaotic mixture of such myriad emotions, especially in a person who he knew had been so successful in smothering them his whole life. And the anger and frustration within that showed through the complex flood told him that he didn’t really know the answer, and it was killing him inside. 

Just like it had with Danny. 

Suddenly the fire became a mirror into himself that he wasn’t prepared to see, and he looked away, unable to process this. He was tired. Way too tired. 

“I’m gonna go back to bed,” he said plainly as he turned and started back toward the bedroom. Whether or not he would actually sleep was unsure, but he needed an excuse not to attempt to keep up this entirely one-sided conversation. “Make yourself at home, I guess.”

Time passed. Days passed. Weeks passed. Danny couldn’t exactly remember how long it had been since Ninja Brian had shown up, but although he didn’t see him much, he hadn’t left, as far as he could tell. The only real indication that he was ever there at all were the occasional strains of piano music, from classical concertos to classic rock, coming seemingly from nowhere.

Nothing much changed, aside from the fact that loud bangs and thuds woke him in the middle of the night. More and more often they came, but when he left the bedroom to see what it was, there were only traces of blood of ambiguous origin, soaked into the already-stained carpet, or pooled on the hardwood floor, or the cheap linoleum tile of the bathroom, a red handprint on the mirror or the porcelain sink. But they were gone before he could clean them up.

And yet, he felt entirely safe. He would wake in the morning to a hot mug of coffee next to a full plate of breakfast food waiting for him on the kitchen counter. He would come home at night to a steaming cup of sleepytime tea resting on his nightstand. In all honesty, Ninja Brian was the best roommate Danny could have asked for. So he stopped checking, knowing exactly what he would find every time.

But the nightmares didn’t stop. When he woke from them screaming, panting and gasping for air, he almost wished Ninja Brian would leave him alone, so that the Ninjas that were sent would just give him what he deserved, and put him out of his misery.

As time went on and the attempted assassinations become more and more frequent, the aftermath became subsequently sloppier. The occasional sighting of blood became knife slices in the floral couch, holes in the walls that tore up the already-peeling tacky wallpaper, shattered picture frames, broken vases, all of which hadn’t been touched since he began calling this place his home. He could tell Ninja Brian was trying his best to fix everything, to hide it all from him, to protect him at all costs, but he was slipping.

Danny awoke one night, the house suspiciously quiet. No thuds, no crashes, no bangs, just the sound of a single police siren wailing faintly in the distance.

He sat up in the dark, the light of the streetlight that stood directly outside dimly illuminating the surfaces of the antique furniture as the substitute for a full moon through the dainty lace curtains that flowed gently over the bedroom window. The relative silence was more unsettling than anything, the sound of murder and destruction happening in the living room having become the norm. This amount of quiet was eerie and disconcerting.

He didn’t bother turning on the light as he rose from the bed and ventured out into the rest of the house. He was curious more than anything, wondering how Ninja Brian had lasted this long and just now had gotten himself killed. 

But there was nothing. No new property damage, no blood, no scratches, no stabs… nothing.

Maybe this was a new kind of nightmare; one where he would be consumed, rather than by dark viscous liquid, instead by darkness and silence. 

As he passed the front door, the sound of heavy footsteps creaking the floorboards of the porch startled him to a stop. He froze, and listened.

Something heavy slammed against the door.

Danny moved to open it. Hopefully this would be what finally killed him. 

The door fell open under the weight of a human body, and a black-clad figure collapsed onto the floor. Although labored, the fact that it was still breathing at all could only mean that it was Ninja Brian. 

“Hey buddy,” Danny cooed confusedly, dragging him further inside and closing the door behind him. He flicked on the light which, although dim, made both of them squint from the lack of time to adjust. 

He knelt down beside him and assessed the damage. In the absence of light and through the dark fabric, he hadn’t seen the massive amounts of blood that seeped through the slashed holes of Ninja Brian’s clothing, staining his hands and the floor underneath him. Danny wasn’t sure exactly how much was his.

“You alright?” He asked this almost rhetorically, knowing he wouldn’t get an answer. “Look at me, man. What happened?”

As he struggled to keep them open, Ninja Brian’s eyes were filled with just as much fervent anger as they had been the last time Danny had seen them, but the intensity of the fire was flickering and fading. Through the holes in the fabric, some torn and some cut, fresh blood was coating old dried blood as it seeped out of the wounds in his skin. These were deeper than pure and simple compression could help… but he wasn’t about to take this guy to a hospital. The fewer people knew about this the better, and he also couldn’t trust Ninja Brian not to murder anybody while they were there. He had to do his best with the few tools that he had, and if he didn’t make it, it was out of his hands. 

As gently as he could despite how heavy he was, Danny lifted Ninja Brian onto his feet, bearing most of the weight of his weak body, and led him to the bed. 

His eyes were closed as the back of his head hit the headboard, but Danny caught them as they fluttered open, and in just a brief moment, he saw so many things. Contempt and defiance, which were just expected personality traits at this point, but underneath that were layers of more, that, without him even having to ask, told him the entire story. 

Understanding, in that he knew now why Danny felt the need to run. Confusion, not knowing the reason why after all these years he was only now feeling the emotions he had suppressed for his entire life. Compassion, in that, although he couldn’t fully understand why, he cared whether Danny lived or died. Protectiveness, in that everything he felt compelled him to defend him. 

And relief, in that there would be no more ringing of long-deactivated phones in the middle of the night. No more feeling malicious eyes on him every move he made. No more merciless killing, no more constant fear. 

It was all over.


	2. Mind

A payphone ringing on a nearby shadowy street corner underneath his perch broke Ninja Brian out of his meditative trance. 

He pressed the stop button on the antique boombox that sat innocently next to him. The play button clicked back up to its natural position, halting the melodic strains of the concerto that had previously been produced from the cassette that was housed in the front compartment (a mix tape he stole from a piano teacher he had killed — one of his favorite souvenirs). 

He knew exactly what the call was about before he answered it, lifting the old black plastic receiver off of its usual station and wordlessly bringing it to his ear.

The deep, modulated voice crackled as it delivered the familiar coded message through the ancient payphone. “It’s snowing on Mount Fuji.” A summons.

Ninja Brian always thought the cavernous hallway that was the throne room of the Clan was ostentatious. Especially for an organization that prided itself on keeping quiet and under wraps, the way every quiet breath was magnified as it reverberated along the walls was just downright impractical. Maybe it was a test of skill for the underlings, to see if their silence really was truly noiseless as advertised. More than likely, though, the Master was just a pretentious piece of —

“Ninja Brian.” The rumbling altered voice, although calm, was not quiet as it echoed, penetrating the black fabric of his mask and piercing his skull. Migraine-worthy, for sure. 

Ninja Brian stared expectantly forward into the semi-darkness. For all the drama and showiness, despite having been told his entire life that this was his family, he couldn’t say he had ever seen the Ninja Master’s face. It was always shrouded in shadow, the only visible part being the outline of their lower half, flanked on either side by the Right and Left Hands, respectively. Intimidating the first time, but after 35 years… 

“Your next target is an… unfortunate one.” The Right Hand produced a manila envelope from the shadows and approached Ninja Brian, extending it to him, eyes menacing behind the uniform mask. He took it thoughtlessly, and the Right Hand returned to their position at the Master’s flank. 

More silence. Ninja Brian stood unwavering. Awaiting orders. Didn’t have the patience for melodrama. 

“One of your own kind, in fact.” 

The silent stare continued for a moment. _Own kind? Own kind of what?_ The stretch of silence became pointedly long, the Master growing impatient at Ninja Brian’s lack of curiosity regarding what was inside the envelope. So he opened it, really only to make them keep talking so that they could eventually finish and he could leave. 

“One of your Brothers has gone rogue.” As he slid the contents of the envelope out just far enough to see, he was met with an unfamiliar face. Chiseled, ruggedly handsome, yet the unkempt mess of curls that framed it gave it a childlike quality that was… almost charming. “He let his emotions overtake him. He hasn’t returned since his last extermination mission.”

Backstory. Unnecessary. Just say who to kill. 

“We need you to find Ninja Daniel and eliminate him.”

Ninja Daniel? The elite Ninja Daniel? Monarch-slaying, rapid-killing-machine, mass-murdering Ninja Daniel?

No problem. 

Ninja Brian nodded once in affirmation and wordlessly left the way he came. 

Back on his usual perch on the roof of his favorite sketchy bail bonds office, he took another look at the contents of the envelope. 

Beyond the first page of his headshot were some more fuzzy full-body candid surveillance photos, capturing his tall lanky frame at every angle. Those were followed by an address of an old house, accompanied by a photo of the front door. The place was ancient, cracked, chipped, and overgrown, as if nobody had been living there for years. Information on security (nonexistent), how updated the locking mechanisms on the doors and windows were (at least thirty years old), and the nosiness factor of the neighbors (very low). A name (Ninja Daniel) and an alias (Daniel Sexbang, a.k.a. Danny). Easy enough. Circumstances notwithstanding, this was basically any other extermination. 

He returned the pages back to their original location inside the yellow-orange sleeve of paper and looked out over the lights of the city. Underneath the sound of hundreds of distant, unintelligible, meaningless conversations beneath him, neon signs that marked dive bars, pawn shops, motels, and convenience stores buzzed faintly. Some of them blinked by design, others flickered from years of neglect. Car motors hummed. A police siren seemed to always be sounding somewhere in the distance. There was something serene about this mixture of sound, and Ninja Brian found it mostly soothing. 

And when the conversations turned to drunken fights, some asshole’s fancy Mustang didn’t have a muffler as it sped down the street, or the siren’s location was much nearer than usual and the distant whistle turned to a closer shriek, he found that served as a nice reminder of why he did what he did. The Master could say what he wanted about “wasting resources” and “apex predators” and whatever bullshit, but the real reason Ninja Brian found it easy to do his job was because humans were assholes and there were too many of them. Plain and simple. 

He had gained favor with the Clan for his proactiveness, killing humans indiscriminately without being asked. So much so, that he was offered a position as a Hand. His refusal was met with disappointment, but the Hands didn’t really… _do_ anything. They just stood there to add to the pretentiously menacing atmosphere of the Master, serving as literal hands. Retrieving envelopes. Giving them out. Printing the papers. Dialing the phone. It looked boring as shit. Ninja Brian would much rather be out actually killing people than just standing there, doing as he was told and nothing else. 

It was still admirable though, his apparent dedication to the cause, however true that might have been. So he was always the first to be called upon for the most difficult targets and the most dangerous missions. He was unpredictable, but he was quiet, stealthy, cooperative, and most importantly, he was lethal. Not a single victim, specifically targeted or otherwise, survived an encounter with Ninja Brian. And the world was better for it, removing the pollutive heaps of parasitic flesh from the earth.

As for right now, he had to focus on finding one specific pollutive heap of parasitic flesh.

He was easy to find. Very easy. It was almost like he _wanted_ to be found. Not that it would have been difficult anyway — his crazy head of wild brown curls and his tall, lanky stature made him stand out among most crowds. So the fact that he was _calling attention_ to himself, going out on the town, shamelessly flirting with every attractive woman he saw… he was either incredibly stupid, or he was borderline suicidal.  
Judging by the legends, though, one would have to guess the latter. 

Ninja Brian questioned on numerous occasions whether he had the right guy. Ninja Daniel was known as a merciless executioner. His deadly tactics could put any asshole mercenary to shame. He was swift and undetectable. This guy though? The skinny beanpole with both the sex drive and the suaveness of a 15-year-old? He was a fucking nerd. 

But by all accounts, he was the right target; the only Daniel Sexbang that had existed for the past three months, living in a sketchy neighborhood in the ass-end of Atlantic City. Ninja Brian had originally taken it as a worthy challenge to take down one of the Clan’s top members, but this? It seemed too easy. 

He watched from the shadows as Danny laid it on thick with some poor woman who was in the process of rejecting him. He was leaning, overly casual, on the wall of her house as he watched her unlock her front door, saying something by which she was considerably less impressed than he had expected, or noticed, as it seemed. 

The door ended up shut with Danny on the outside, and his look of frustrated disappointment catalyzed a brief pang of…

Something?

_Is this what emotions are like?_

No. Emotions are only felt by humans. Ninja Brian was only a human in the biological sense of the word, raised and brought up to be a sociopathic killing machine. 

So what the fuck was that?

Danny descended the front porch steps and stopped. There was a long moment of silence. His tenseness was something that was familiar to Ninja Brian. Humans had this strange innate sense of presence and could feel when they were not alone, and this was the telltale sign: shoulders squared, muscles tense but motionless, prepared to fight off an ambush; head up at attention, alert, employing every sense perception. Silent. Waiting. Patient. 

“I know you’re there.”

Ninja Brian knew. But he remained hidden, watching. 

“If you’re gonna kill me, just fuckin’ do it already,” Danny said quietly, voice melodic and soft as it drifted through the night air.

He could. He _should_. 

He didn’t. 

There was enervation in Danny’s words and in his demeanor that Ninja Brian had never seen before. He was weak. Even as a persistence predator, the years upon years of training, slaughter, more training, and more slaughter had pushed him to his outer limits and he had become completely and utterly exhausted. But it was on more than a physical level, like he was exhausted on the inside as well, deeply and existentially tired. Tired of _everything_.

It was a foreign concept to Ninja Brian. As was the dull pain he felt in his core. What the hell? Where did that come from? No one had laid a finger on him, and yet it felt like someone had punched a hole straight through his chest cavity. It _hurt_. And he hadn’t felt anything, much less pain, in a very long time. 

Something was very wrong here. In more ways than one. Something was wrong with the situation as a whole, and most importantly, something was wrong with Ninja Brian. He wasn’t supposed to feel like this. He wasn’t supposed to feel at all. He never had. And now that he had been caught off guard by these feelings, he had no idea what to do with them. 

He _could_ just do as he was asked and kill Danny right now, quickly and painlessly. He definitely should. God knows the poor kid probably wouldn’t put up much of a fight. 

But did he want to?

Could he, really, when his target was the most harmless thing on the face of this wretched earth? That hadn’t stopped him before. But for whatever reason... this was different. 

Ninja Brian remained in his protective shadow and just watched, through another seemingly eternal stretch of expectant silence, until Danny let out a deep, exasperated sigh, and walked home. 

Something drove Ninja Brian to follow him. 

Persistence, yes; he had a job to do and he wasn’t about to let emotions take hold of him. Not now. Silent and secretive, he moved from shadow to shadow, scaling houses and crossing rooftops, watching. 

But there was also curiosity. Curiosity in how this guy lived, what he was about, why he was like… _that_. The reason he felt this way was unexplainable, but he could feel the emotions rising up from the inner containment cell to which they had been confined, suppressed for so many years. It was an inner mutiny, and he didn’t know if he could stop it this time. 

“It’s raining on Mount Fuji.”

Ninja Brian didn’t feel fear. But he knew what this was about. He knew he had fucked up. And now he was going to face the consequences. 

He had long ago gotten over the sense of looming dread that those cavernous high ceilings instilled within a person, and yet now, of all times, he felt that almost nostalgic chill, limbs stiffening in defiance, intimidated again as he was the first time. 

God, that was annoying. It’s like once you feel one feeling, you forget all your training, all the times it was beaten out of you, and you revert back to the emotional state of a child, feeling everything at once like it’s the first time. 

He stopped at the usual place, standing before the shadowy figure, staring into the darkness. 

“What’s taking so long?” The inflection was objectively calm and collected, but the searing anger that emanated from the Master’s sole being injected venom into the words, stinging with every syllable. 

Ninja Brian silently stared ahead for a moment in thought. That was a good question. The only answer he could think to give was an honest, ambivalent shrug. 

“You have failed me.”

Yeah. He had. But as his emotions came again, this time led by contempt for the pretentiousness of his superior, the real question was whether or not he cared. 

“You have 48 hours to complete your mission before I send someone more competent to eliminate you both.”

Fair enough. He couldn’t say he blamed them. After all, the current situation made Ninja Brian look _awfully_ traitorous. Which might even be the case. He hadn’t decided yet. More time would be nice, though he could tell it wasn’t going to be given to him. 

Despite what was probably in his best interests when it came to making this decision, Ninja Brian found himself unable to stop watching Danny. He watched him through windows while he was inside, followed him as he wandered the streets, as he bought sandwiches and condoms, as he was occasionally successful in his many attempts to court women, not to mention the countless times he wasn’t. 

He couldn’t say exactly why he was so fascinated. Pity, perhaps. Maybe pure and simple curiosity. 

As he watched the bedroom window of the old house, however, and he saw a humanoid form in a familiar black uniform gracefully slide open the window as if it had never been locked in the first place and enter through it, a wave of heat in the form of panicked anger washed over him and he realized that the reason he was watching wasn’t either of those things. 

He didn’t want the kid to get hurt. 

He mindlessly approached the window and lifted himself through it, on much the same path as the intruder, not really in control of himself.

For years, everything had been calculated and meticulous; Ninja Brian never acted out of pure feeling. Nevertheless, his intuition was pulling him, dragging him on this path on which he felt he never should have set foot in the first place. 

And yet, in spite of his best efforts, here he was, standing in the darkness of Danny’s bedroom behind the newly-hired assassin who now loomed over the bed and was prepared to strike quickly and lethally before a swift escape. 

The street light outside glinted off the metal of the intruder’s blade, triggering a spark of rage within Ninja Brian as he drew his own, his hand controlled by some unknown force.

As the knife plunged into the side of their neck, blood bountifully spraying from the punctured artery and coating Ninja Brian’s hand, the intruder stayed impressively silent. Stuck to their training. Good for them. The Master had promised someone more competent, and he definitely delivered.

Ninja Brian realized too late that the body was falling forward rather than collapsing downward, and as it landed across Danny’s jean-clad legs, he was woken from his deep slumber, and, predictably panicking, he fumbled for the switch of his lamp in the darkness. 

Ninja Brian’s senses had left him. He was paralyzed, not knowing what to do. There was no protocol for this, no method of training to give a guideline on how to handle this kind of thing. He didn’t have time to hide before light flooded the scene before him, and he realized what an absolute goddamn mess he had made. In _every_ sense. 

After registering what he was looking at, Danny looked up to identify the perpetrator. He obviously didn’t recognize him, which was good, but his muscles visibly tensed as he prepared himself, most likely assuming that Ninja Brian was there to kill him. Technically he was, but he didn’t have much of an intention to right at that moment. 

The only sound in the long moment of silence was soft, repetitive scratching of a record at end. 

After a long moment, Danny’s eyebrows furrowed slightly in confused thought. His eyes strayed down to the recently-used knife that Ninja Brian still wielded, then to the body that lay across him. Cogs were visibly turning as he struggled to put the pieces together in his tired mind. Which was an understandable reaction; there wasn’t much logical evidence to suggest a reason why a Ninja assassin would have assassinated another Ninja assassin.

“You just _had_ to go for the carotid, didn’t you?” 

Ninja Brian didn’t know how to respond to that. He was expecting a “ _what’s going on?_ ” or at the very least, a “ _what the fuck?_ ”. That, however, was decidedly an abnormal response from just anybody. All doubt was gone that he had the right guy. 

What an insufferable prick, though. Of course he went for the carotid. It was the most sure way to make somebody bleed out. Damage to the carotid artery was incredibly difficult to repair. He of all people should know that. 

There was movement then as Danny shoved the body downward to free his dumb gangly legs and swung them over the side of the bed to sit up fully, leaning on one hand for support. He rubbed his eyes with the other before it left them to run over his whole face a couple of times to wake himself up. He glanced once more at the corpse that now lay across the foot of his bed, and carelessly tossed the blankets over it. 

He looked up at Ninja Brian tiredly. “You want some tea?”

Ninja Brian didn’t respond. How dare he? What the hell kind of person was he, that after a Ninja was murdered in his bedroom and bled out on top of him while he was sleeping, to just offer the guy refreshments?

Also yes. He did want some tea. 

“Cool,” even after no real response. He nodded to himself as he stood (he was definitely taller up close) and shuffled toward the door. 

While in the process of opening it, he turned back and pointed at Ninja Brian. “You’re buying me new sheets.”

What an asshole. 

He silently followed Danny through the door he had left wide open behind him, the dim lights in the small house flicking on room-by-room as he entered them, ending in the kitchen where cupboards slammed open and iron clanged against iron. Making tea, probably. At least he kept his promises. 

The place was decorated exclusively with old-lady furniture, but the layers of dust signified neglect in that none of it had been touched in ages. Tarnished golden-brown frames housed pictures of happy families that were obviously not Danny’s, covering patches of tiny white flowers on peeling pale yellow wallpaper. There was a sloppily handmade doily on every horizontal wood surface; the dining table, the coffee table, the side table that flanked the floral cloth-covered sofa… and the entertainment center, which served as the home of the record player, the unmistakable dark wood box with the spinning disk inside, clear plastic lid left propped open. 

And, good god, the records. Ninja Brian didn’t think he had ever seen that many in his life. At least not this haphazard and random. On the short shelves, they had been stacked neatly (most likely the first ones, the work of the original owner of the house). Elvis Presley, Chuck Berry, and Chubby Checker, to be expected. Gordon Lightfoot. Don McLean. The Monkees. Those ones were left untouched, neatly stacked on the shelves. And then where the organization devolved into chaos, he noticed as he rifled through the tall disorderly stacks, things got weirder. The Beatles, okay… The Rolling Stones, sure… The Cure? Def Leppard… Tears for Fears… Billy Idol?

Right now the scratching was getting on his nerves. He needed to replace it with something. Something… better. There was one thing on his mind that he knew, in such a varied collection, had to be in there somewhere. 

And there it was. Elton John. Perfect. 

He pulled the blue cardboard out from the middle of the stack and carefully switched out the records, sliding Rush’s _Fly by Night_ back into its sleeve and returning it to its place at the top of the left-hand stack. 

Ninja Brian had never really felt happiness, but he had a soft spot for the sound of a piano. For whatever reason, it struck just the right chord with him, and calmed him, smoothing every frayed nerve he might have had. 

“Elton John fan, huh?” Ninja Brian didn’t get caught off-guard easily, but he had let his mind wander. Startled, he spun around to see Danny leaning in the doorframe of the kitchen, arms crossed, bemused. 

Ninja Brian narrowed his eyes threateningly. So what if he was?

Danny raised his hands in surrender. “It’s okay man, I am too,” he laughed, “Why do you think I have so many of his records?”

Ninja Brian relaxed a little and nodded. He did have a point. 

Danny kept talking as he retreated back into the kitchen, rambling about his collection. He was annoying as all hell, but damned if he wasn’t passionate. There was something to be said for that. That out of an entire life of smothering his emotions, he could come out on the other side feeling more than ever. The more he thought, the more he wondered whether it really was on purpose like he thought it had been. He wondered if it was possible that, out of a lifetime of controlling one’s emotions, they could still come back to haunt you, and come back stronger than they had been before. He wondered if it was possible that some emotions were stronger than others, leaders of the pack, powerful to the point of being practically unstoppable. Because if that was the case, he was a firsthand witness. 

Danny had startled him out of his thoughts again as he appeared behind him, one hand casually wrapped around the handle of a nondescript ceramic mug, from which copious amounts of steam emanated. Ninja Brian only caught the last part of whatever he had been saying. “Rush is probably my favorite.”

Ninja Brian glanced at the round yellow eyes that pierced through the dark purple hues of the cardboard cover to his left. 

Danny hummed a confirmation around a mouthful of tea. He started talking again, something about Rush, before trailing off into an uncomfortable silence. Ninja Brian busied himself by continuing to flip through the record stack he had his hand in, not even really registering at this point the albums at which he was looking. 

“Who are you, anyway?” Danny’s light, canorous voice rang in Ninja Brian’s ears. Annoying. So annoying. Maybe if he pretended like he hadn’t heard the question, Danny would give up and leave him alone. 

But the given word. The character that stood out on his chest, yellow on black, as obvious as a storefront advertisement. A dead giveaway. He forgot about those.

“Ninja _Brian_?” He grimaced at the sound of his name and how it tumbled out incredulously from Danny’s mouth. Like he was a celebrity or something. “Holy shit…” 

This was wrong. He shouldn’t be here right now. He shouldn’t have let Danny live long enough to identify him like this. 

“Why?”

Well, wasn’t _that_ the question of the year. Why? Why didn’t he kill him on any of the many occasions on which he had the chance? Why was he defying his entire lifetime of brutal disciplinary action for one meaningless asshole? Why was he feeling things? He didn’t have any more of a clue than Danny did, and it was killing him. 

He looked up and made contact with a pair of sad brown eyes, lost, confused, and tired. And it stirred something within him like an ancient god awakening, a flood that he was struggling now to suppress.

Danny saw the frustration and the anger, and looked away, turning back toward the short hallway. “I’m gonna go back to bed,” he threw over his shoulder, “Make yourself at home, I guess.”

He shouldn’t have. But he did. And, inexplicably, he couldn’t stay away. 

He cursed himself as he made Danny real food to replace his shitty diet, full of hate every moment he spent making him as comfortable as possible. The urge to protect something had never been stronger, and he despised his own actions for doing so.

He stopped answering phones, knowing that it was raining on Mount Fuji. He didn’t care. If he was being honest with himself, he never really cared. It was only now that he bore any real animosity toward the source of the calls. 

And the assassins kept coming. It started out infrequently as a single Ninja. Then it amped up, the visits more frequent. Soon they were sending multiple at once, and it was getting harder and harder to kill all of them. The bodies were piling up, and cleaning up the messes left from murder after murder was exhausting. 

But he knew they weren’t going to stop. He had to eliminate the source, to end this. To end it all.

As he ran low on physical strength, his mental strength wavered as well, and he became weak to the advancements of his long-suppressed emotions. So he let them take over, curious to see where they would take him. 

And take him, they did. 

They led him directly to the throne room. They took control of every thought and every muscle as they moved him. Moved his hands. Sliced. Stabbed. Cut. Wave after wave of bodyguards, called to be a collective meat shield, went down. Not without a fight, but the stabs of pain from the blades that were not his only served as fuel for the emotions which drove him forward. He was tired. But he didn’t stop. He couldn’t stop. He had a job to do. And his target was sitting and watching in amusement on the other side of the ocean of obstacles both living and dead. It became increasingly harder to navigate the sea of bodies, some alive and preparing their attacks, some writhing on the floor as they bled out, some dead and completely motionless. 

Fabric was slashed. Skin was cut. Necks snapped. Blood flowed. And Ninja Brian lost track of himself. 

He remembered getting closer. He remembered triumph at the fact that very few bodies were left upright. He remembered pain. He remembered blood, so much blood. 

He wasn’t entirely sure when it had ended, but he now found himself struggling to move his tired limbs, blood still warm as it continued to soak through the black fabric of his clothing, mingling with that which had gone cold and crusty.

He approached the door of the one place he knew, white paint having chipped off in most places to reveal the flimsy dark wood underneath, and, lacking the dexterity to move his hand to open it, he threw himself against it, hoping the sound would alert the occupant of the house to his presence. 

He rested against the wood, eyes closing as he fought against the urge to collapse. But when the door opened, his legs gave in and he fell inside, his tired body welcoming the chance to rest.

“Hey, buddy,” Danny’s gentle tenor was rife with concern as he dragged Ninja Brian fully inside and closed the door behind him. He flinched at the sudden flood of yellow light, and then Danny was kneeling beside him.

“You alright? Look at me, man. What happened?”

Ninja Brian opened his eyes fully to look at Danny, attempting to glare at him with all the hatred and anger he had within him, to let him know how much he despised his existence, but failing when all that met him in those big, sweet, stupid, earthy doe eyes of his was concern, confusion, and empathy. Empathy in the connection, knowing what it was to feel, and how difficult it was to do so for the first time in one’s life. Confusion as to why Ninja Brian felt he was worth the suffering, why he was worth dropping an entire way of life to protect. And concern… Because he cared.

Why did he care about someone whose primary directive was to kill him?

Maybe he saw through it. Maybe he saw the truth underneath, and recognized something in Ninja Brian that he had seen and felt before; something that he had tried in vain to smother and kill just as he had everything else in his life. He had seen it in himself, and he saw it now in the eyes of the pile of walking contempt that now lay helpless on his living room floor.

It was supremely annoying. It made him that much more difficult to hate.

He had kind of given up on that a while ago though, and he guessed now it didn’t matter. It wasn’t his job to kill him anymore; if he didn’t want to, he didn’t have to. 

Humans had been a putrid stain on the earth for as long as Ninja Brian could remember, but maybe, he thought, as Danny finished assessing his wounds and pulled him up to his feet, bearing most of the weight as he led him to the bed, made him lie down, and got everything that could be used as a medical supply… 

… Maybe he had found an exception.


	3. Soul

Danny couldn’t help but notice the newfound calmness and quietness in his waking life. It was so different from what he had grown accustomed to. Phones were silent. There were no more sounds of violence waking him in the middle of the night. The holes in the walls had been patched and his broken furniture fixed. The nightmares were less prevalent. He couldn’t undo his past, but he could save his future, and vow to never purposefully harm another living soul as long as he lived, as reparation for the harm he had caused. 

So that’s what he did. 

The only thing that didn’t change was the constant feeling of being watched, but it was of a different color now; watchful and protective rather than angry and menacing. As annoying as it was to be unable to have even occasional privacy, he felt as though the annoyance was a payment that he could afford. A minor irritation for the indefinite foreseeable future was more than a fair bargain in exchange for the genocide of an entire clan of human beings which he had catalyzed. 

As for Ninja Brian, he kept an eye on Danny mostly because he didn’t have much else to do anymore. But also, if he was being completely honest with himself, there was a part of him, very small but furiously overpowering, that felt responsible for his security. 

For all intents and purposes, he shouldn’t have felt like that. Danny was just another meaningless life form on this shit-hole of a planet. It wasn’t any more difficult now to kill other people than it was before this whole mess happened. After the time he spent healing his physical wounds, in and out of consciousness on Danny’s bed, Ninja Brian had tried to leave him be, to let him live his stupid life however he wanted because it seemed he deserved as much. But the farther he got, and the more time he spent away, the more that feeling of protectiveness crept back in, clouding his thoughts in an inescapable fog. No amount of murder he could commit in an attempt to bring himself back to the executioner he once was made the feeling go away. Although internally kicking and screaming, it caused him to return. Back to that cracked painted-white door of the house that didn’t belong to its resident. 

But really, where else was he going to go?

Danny was startled by the sound of the front door opening and closing — he could have sworn he locked it — but relaxed when he saw the familiar black full-body uniform casually shuffle inside like a dad coming home from a long day at work. Although not clearly visible through the dark fabric, Danny could smell the old blood that had long ago soaked into the fibers from across the room where he sat at the dining table with his morning coffee. 

“Hey man,” he greeted, “Where’ve you been?” 

Ninja Brian’s only response to his absolute nonchalance was an honest, hateful glare. 

Although Danny knew he wouldn’t get a response, the answer didn’t really matter. He was back now. Back to the person to whom he felt an irritatingly enigmatic attachment, like cosmic handcuffs with no key, binding the two together, imprisoning them in this fate. He really only had the illusion of choice. He couldn’t make himself leave no matter how hard he tried. 

It was a place that felt strangely right. The place he felt he had to be. The place that, on some level, he felt like he belonged. 

Maybe it was the social animal inside him that caused it; pure biology dictating the feeling of connection through trauma and shared experiences. 

Maybe there was something about being human that was different, that he didn’t understand, and probably never would. 

Maybe it was just Danny. 

_Maybe this is what home feels like._

**Author's Note:**

> Holy shit you guys! This one didn’t get a whole lot of hits, but you made up for it with how much love you’re showing in the comments! I appreciate it so so so much ❤️ Thank you!


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